Pass go. Collect $200

A couple of weeks ago the Grid posted a blog introducing the idea that your custom domain name is effectively your digital address. I want to take that idea a step further and make the point that not only is having a unique digital address essential to being successful in the era of the internet, but there is also a tremendous business opportunity available to anyone who is willing to get involved and play the digital real estate game.

In the early days of the internet, users had no option but to take whatever the big internet players gave to them in terms of identity, but that’s all changed now. Instead of being beholden to big brother for a single address, users can accumulate as many digital properties as they want. Once the properties have been acquired they can be built on with a simple landing page and then effectively rented out by selling the traffic of the new sites to the big boys. This is all reminiscent of the real estate game of Monopoly. The key to winning this game is to acquire as many properties as possible, then develop them and collect rent. Of course in the real world, not only can you collect rent but you can sell your digital properties on and looking great is a huge part of that, but that’s a discussion for a future article.

Partners like Uniregistry and the Grid can help you both compete and win at this game. You can register digital addresses with Uniregistry, as a Grid user getting many of the addresses for free in the first year. You can use the Grid to build a simple landing page, connect this to social media and then monetize your traffic. The more times you pass GO, the more properties you acquire, the more you develop them, the more rent you collect.

With the half the worlds population being online in 2018 there’s never been a more visible time. More people on the internet equals more visitors for the sites that are out there, more people figuring out the intrinsic value of a domain name, in short - more people looking for a piece of the pie. So my advice is to not waste any more time, start building your portfolio of custom domain names, build Gridsites on them to bring in the traffic which can then be monetized.